


Shatter

by thepurplewombat



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dark, Sherlock Is Not Okay, Torture, angsty, mentions of prostitution and torture and non-con, poem fic, what Sherlock did on his holiday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 11:25:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1159135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepurplewombat/pseuds/thepurplewombat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Tokyo, you kill your first man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shatter

**Author's Note:**

> The Poem quoted throughout is 'The Second Coming' by Yeats.

_Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;_

 

Moriarty’s web is falling apart faster than you can kill it, and you need to move _faster_. In Berlin, you tell yourself that it’s just this once. You desperately need the edge it will give you now, when he isn’t here to conduct your light.

 

_Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,_

Johannesburg, and you get lost in the shantytowns and shebeens of Soweto, a tall pale white man in shabby clothes, sharp-eyed. You buy street drugs off anyone who will sell to you.

You don’t sleep for ninety hours.

 

_The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere_

 

In Tokyo you kill your first man. You’re high as a fucking kite and none of it matters, not his death, not his blood in your hair and on your hands. He’s a link in a chain that will eventually lead you home, and when he has given you what you need you end him with as much remorse as you would show an ant. Maybe less.

 

_The ceremony of innocence is drowned_

 

After Tokyo it all becomes so much easier. You kill another man in Hong Kong. Not what he expected when he rented company for the night.  In Sydney, you slice a woman’s eyelids off and her husband tells you what you need to know. You take something to forget but it makes you slow and stupid, and you can’t afford that, can’t take the time to delete any of it. So it plays behind your eyelids every time they meet. You sleep less and less.

 

_The best lack all conviction, while the worst_

There comes a day when you forget what it’s all for. You’re in a nameless shithole in the heartland of America, the arse end of the universe with the scum of the earth and you hurt in every muscle. You can’t kill this one yet but you’ve never wanted to do anything as badly as you want to take a knife to the hands that hold you down and plant bruises on your skin. You don’t. You can’t remember why you need to know what he knows but you know that it is _vital_ and so you kneel and beg and weep and take what he gives you and when the time comes you take him apart with care and precision. You put yourself together one slow piece at a time. The drugs don't help so you discard them. They're not what you need anymore.

 

_Are full of passionate intensity._

 

When you go home it’s easy to pretend that everything is whole again, that you haven’t shattered yourself on the altar of expediency. Except that in the dead of night you wake from dreams of blood and death and pain and you _want_ so much. And sometimes you go into the bathroom and you look in the mirror and you see the lust in your eyes. You taste blood in your dreams and wake up shaking with bone-deep need.

It’s only a matter of time.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This story may have a sequel someday. Anybody for some serial killer Sherlock?


End file.
